*But wait . . . the earth wasn’t even created till a little over 6000 years ago. Where does “science” come up with ‘6-10 million years ago’? IT’S NOT IN THE BIBLE!!! And besides, only God can change things like that anyway. Man sure can’t.*

I think this is just more evidence to support the idea that Conservatives, especially Tea Party People, don’t know what words mean. And I don’t think this was a spell check error, I think she used the word she meant to use, but didn’t know what it really meant.

Sounds like she either misspelled ‘condemning’, or doesn’t know that ‘condoning’ and ‘condemning’ are not the same, but essentially opposites (even though they both start with ‘con’ and end with ‘ing’). I’m guessing the latter.

I have only met two people with facial tattoos and both are white. Very white. Super, duper, white to the exclusion of all reason. i.e. white supremacists. Although, to be fair, it does seem like they prefer to have their tattoos that actually proclaim their Nazi beliefs on places like their necks and/or the backs of their hands.

I can just see it now…Seventy years into the future, grave markers for those who promoted pollution over preservation will be stained a deep yellow from all the piss their grand-descendants will have showered them with.

I have started outlining my thoughts on the small arms used by our military from the perspective of one who was charged with making them more effective. My working title is…

“Underpowered: Why the most expensive military on earth refuses to issue effective rifles.”

Here are a few tidbits:

1. Why the M16 and it’s 5.56X45mm ammo should have never been adopted.
2. A brief look at the 27 times, up to 1997, it was officially proposed to develop more effective rifles, who stopped it, and why.
3. The utter impossibility of using mere facts to persuade ideologues to change their position.
4. Ammunition that could make the M16 an effective platform and platforms that could make the 5.56X45mm round more effective.
5. Why they chopped 5.5 inches off the barrel of the M16 and turned it into the M4 carbine.

The last is the most interesting, most damming, and least technical bit of the history of U.S. small arms. Here’s the very brief version.

From the first day of its use the military was looking for ways to make the M16 and its ammunition truly effective at actually stopping a person from being able to fight. Over the decades many different propellants were used and they were increasingly compressed in order to fit the most possible propellant into the very small case of the 5.56X45mm ammo. Bullet designs were also upgraded frequently and the military did indeed come up with a round that was pretty good.

Unfortunately, that ammunition also resulted in barrel erosion after only several-hundred rounds and that erosion resulted in decreased accuracy and effectiveness from old guns. Funny things happen to propellants when they are compressed and the fine-grained and highly compressed propellant burns so hot that it actually would melt the steel in the first couple inches after the chamber. So? The military found itself in possession of an entire generation of rifles that were functionally good but couldn’t hit the broad side of a Muslim and wouldn’t stop said Muslim unless one followed up the shot with the gun-butt or a rock. What was the U.S. military’s response to having a whole bunch of shot out barrels? They simply cut off the damaged portion and bored new chambers and adopted an even less effective ammunition. The current issue ammunition, when fired from the cut off barrel of the M4 carbine, has been found to be ineffective by every metric applied!

Real men need comforting. Means a lot to “heroes” — or whatever it is they’re supposed to be. We used to refer to guns as ‘walnut-stocked pecker extenders,’ an obsolete term in these days of the AR-15. Glad they’ve found another way to help with their man thing.

Any assault rifle has one purpose. It is a device that allows the most untrainable moron on the planet to send the highest possible number of bullets flying in the general direction of the enemy in the shortest possible time and never requires said moron to actually understand how or why a gun works.

This idea blew up in the faces of the generals who selected the M16 when they placed them in the hands of morons who didn’t know how or why a gun works and, in very short order, the guns didn’t work any more. Modifications to the gun, the ammo, and the training did result in a more reliable weapon that the average soldier could depend on to fire an entire magazine without a stoppage but the terminal ballistics remain suspect, at best, to this day.

The ordinance officers that I worked with usually referred to the M16 as “a toy” or “the Mattel16” or, in one case, “the Hasbro noise maker”. One particular officer, who is still trying to change the system from within despite well more than 20 years of being marginalized, once said that the M16 could be replaced by a pet rock because “a pet rock won’t betray its owner when he needs it most and will kill the enemy every time with a well-placed shot”. I think that same officer also holds the record for longest time of service as a Captain in U.S. Army history. He keeps refusing to be discharged and keeps preventing his promotion by bucking the system and that is very, very, admirable in my book.

No one in the United States has taken note of the total disappearance of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who vanished from view several weeks ago.

In interviews with residents across the country, few if any Americans displayed interest in, or concern about, the whereabouts of Christie, who, until he disappeared, had been a once-prominent political figure.

“I hadn’t really thought about him until you mentioned it,” said Trenton resident Carol Foyler, echoing the opinions of many others in the Garden State. (more)

This got me to thinking. Where is he really? Once he endorsed Trump, he seemed to just disappear.

Here’s my theory. You haven;t seen much of Ben Carson or Chris Christie much, and I think it’s because of something Carson said after he endorsed Trump: That there was some kind of promise of a position in the Trump administration in exchange for Carson’s public endorsement. My guess is Christie was also promised something, and being an actual State Attorney general, he knew the law. I’m guessing he was standing there behind Trump, realizing that whether he intended it to happen or not, he had taken part in a crime. And if anybody ever found out what was said, he could go to prison. (Not that he ever actually would, I’m sure.)

Carson, OTOH, being the complete political imbecile, probably had no idea he was taking part in a crime since he was holding no knives.

That’s my theory. And it’s mine. (Ahem.)

Now I’m going to see if I can turn that in a concise multi-part tweet. I like word challenges.